With Uncle Kevs moolah, I am looking to get a new PC (this one wont open MS Word...). Below is what I am looking at. Please give me some advice on whether you think they are alright (and if all the parts would all work together). In both builds the case, keyboard, mouse and speakers are fairly generic.

Because there is the new processor from AMD 6 core and maybe the 8 for the end in 2010 and maybe the same thing for intel ...
And the sata 3 and usb 3 arrived
So don't be too pressing

For the two config at $1054 and PC 2: $952, i thing it's very expensive

In france you can have better computer for the price !

For the asus monitor
there is two problem

Pixel Pitch: 0.300mm
Viewing Angle (CR 170°(H)/160°(V)

For a better result chose a monitor who have viewing Angle of 178 H 178 V or 170 H 170 V but not lower
And a pitch of 0.27 max and a good contrast

After for me the best config is the Amd because it's good enough to work
You can play games too and the price is lower

but the video card is not great for the price you may take a ATI) 4830 512MB Sapphire
Or a 4890 but it's very expensive on this shop
In france the 4890 cost 139 euros with a convert it's about 208 dollars and it's 255 dollar on you shop

Is a OS license included in those prices? I quickly added up the cost of a similar system from my preferred component supplier, and those prices are about $200 more expensive than their parts.

That's not unreasonable if they're supplied ready to go with an OS, but otherwise, it depends on how highly you value your time.

There's some strange choices in there. If you intend to game on it, the graphics card is junk. The only reason to buy a 9500 is for a Home Theatre PC, since they include onboard video decoding hardware which is useful for dealing with High Definition TV and Blu-ray content. And the new GT220 is better for that role.

If you want to be able to game on it, I'd suggest a Radeon 4850. It's cheap these days, and quite fast. If you're nVidia inclined, the GTS250 is fairly good value for money.

If you don't intend to game on it, and you don't intend to intend to watch HD video content, then the graphics card is far more expensive than you need. In that case, you'd be better off choosing a motherboard based on the Intel G31/G41 chipsets.

The fast and expensive RAM you've specced there will provide only minimal performance gains in that system compared to plain DDR2-800.

Those prices look waaaay too expensive for what you get, and the components seem to be at least two generations older than they need to be.

For the Intel rig I would look at the i5 750 and a P55 board with some 1600MHz DDR3, 4GB of it.

For the AMD rig, My personal choice would be the PhenomII X2 550 for a gaming and production rig, or a AthlonII X4 620 for a multitasking and daily use rig. Paired with a MSI 790FX DDR3 board and 4 GB of the same RAM as above.

Video card, the way to go is the new 5 series cards from ATI, DX11 compliant and very good performance even in DX10/DX9 applictaions. If all you do is surf the net and listen to/create music, then one of the 790GX motherboards will eliminate the need for a graphics card altogether. Get one with Sideport memory, it'll free up the memory bus.

I'm an AMD fan for sure

500GB seems a little small to me - I would up this to one of the new FALS 1TB Western Digital hard drives, they're as fast as the Raptors at half the cost and four times the capacity.

Please, please, please, please do *NOT* get the CM extreme power supplies. They are junk. The Real Power series is much better and this is reflected in their price differences. If you can afford it, get a Corsair 550 watt supply, or something from Seasonic. I would steer clear of Coolermaster and Thermaltake when it comes to power supplies.

Lastly, those configs' prices look like someone is selling you down the river. I wouldn't pay half of the quoted prices for a new PC built with the parts you listed. If you're in Australia, try asking around for a nice cheap place to buy your stuff. $1K AUD should get you a very, very nice PC (better than one built with what I listed).

The prices aren't too extraordinary for Australia, we tend to get sold up the river even by the best suppliers.

That said:

If you're intending to build yourself, MSY is the place to go. Ignore the fact that their website is horrible - if they've got an outlet reasonably near to you, they're the place to go for good prices.

I'm not an AMD fan - their CPU's have been inferior to the Intel lineup since the release of Core 2 three years ago. Their graphics cards (they bought ATI a few years ago) are good value for money and perform well, but have incredibly dodgy drivers and very poor linux support, if such things matter to you.

I agree about the power supplies - the CoolerMaster Extreme series is very ordinary. I'd suggest sticking to Antec, Seasonic (Antec's are actually Seasonic's anyway), Enermax and Corsair. I've had some luck with ToPower and SuperFlower, too - I believe they're built in the same factory as Enermax, which probably explains that.

There's nothing wrong with CoolerMaster's RealPower series, or ThermalTake's ToughPower series, but most of the lower models are generic garbage with a big-brand sticker.

The problem with Intel today is that the integrated chipsets are terribly underpowered for even the most basic tasks, so unless you're scraping the bottom of the barrel, you need a separate graphics card (heat and power consumption increases). With AMD, the total platform is significantly cheaper because of this. The $100 AthlonII x4 620 matches up quite well with the $160 Q8200 for performance, beating it or matching it in most applications. And the 790GX or 785G handle Aero very well, and have decent enough horsepower for some light-duty gaming with games from a few years back.

Sure there was a lull in performance in AMD CPUs for a while, but the overall platform has always been more sensible for the SOHO user (mostly as a result of price/performance). With the new CPUs, things have changed quite a bit, actually. They still can't beat the top-end Intel CPUs, but as long as you're not in the ~$2000 space, AMD is still mostly the way to go for a low- and middle-end PC.

Agreed about the Intel integrated graphics chips - they'll run Aero, but not much more.

AMD Price/performance is better for stock CPU's, sure (except maybe the i7's, the 870 and 920 are pretty damn good value for extraordinary performance), but it's not uncommon for an Intel chip to handle a 30% overclock on the stock cooler. This is diyAudio, after all, a little bit of adventure never goes amiss. I've got an E7300 in the next room which has been running a 27% overclock (2.66ghz to 3.4ghz) since it was new, and it's never missed a beat.

I built a Q6600 system about 2 years ago which ran a stable 40% overclock on the stock cooler - ran a bit hot though with all 4 cores stacked up, so I backed it off to 3.2ghz (33%) and it's run perfectly ever since.

The only Intel system I have which isn't overclocked is the Home Theatre box, since it's in a cupboard - in its case, with the GPU taking care of media decoding duties, the CPU spends most of its time SpeedStep-ed down a few notches. Runs fairly cool now.

Put it in a standard PC case as they are MUCH cheaper than Mini ITX cases.

Unless your needing to do heavy computing tasks such as games, or programming, an atom CPU is more power than you need, I will downgrade to the New ARM CPU's next year probably but then I run Linux.

As a Linux user so would always prefer an ATI graphics solution to Nvidia as open source drivers will come. I would suggest going ATI with your graphics to future proof you when you do switch to Linux. (though I believe the English speaking world will be the last to make the switch)

I suggest windows users buy new computers because their computer is full of viruses. My suggestion is buy a hard drive first and replace your old one. With this new hard drive and install windows if you must (But do a fresh install). Much easier (once you get over the learning curve) is Ubuntu or Mint Linux, though for now stick with a 32 bit version as things are still a little harder with 64 bit and theirs no need if you have 4Gb or less.

quite any pc does everything one needs when it comes to normal tasks like surfing the web or running msoffice (and also think that this two things will converge shortly with MSOfficeLive and GoogleDocuments), also used stuff from users who use to change it
often can help save the planet

if you are to consider an Atom based one, than keep in mind that by now they won't run youtube videos due to Flash having problems with the atom architecture, the ION platform is there to resolve it but it still didn't happened...

the intel GPU will do anything like any other card except gaming (also very linux-friendly): for gaming take an xbox

for hi-fi save every penny for a dac

again those prices are apple-league, i.e. too expensive if they don't come in something you can proudly show off

I think day of pc are gone i think you should buy a Laptop for your personal purpose. Anyway if you want to buy PC then you should get some information about PC assets like speed for Processor and need of memory for latest software and new high resolution games.